SOS Australia

A few hours of testimony before Senate Estimates last week exposed the canker at the heart of school funding in Australia. The canker is the double standards applied to the funding of public and private schools. The Assistant Minister for Education, Anthony Chisholm, announced that a tax rort worth hundreds of millions of dollars to elite private schools would continue but refused to renounce accounting tricks that swindle public schools of billions in funding. The double standard is despicable. In effect, Labor is refusing to fully fund public schools but private school funding privileges are sacrosanct.

The hearing revealed that the Albanese Government is cowered by the private school lobby. It capitulated to an orchestrated campaign by the private school lobby and its allies to retain its privileged tax deductibility for donations to school building funds and reject a draft recommendation by the Productivity Commission to end the rort. Labor’s capitulation is not surprising given its long record of caving in to the private school lobby such as the special deals that undermined the effectiveness of the Gonski funding model and ensured that private schools would continue to be over-funded.

Education Ministers meet at the end of this week in the context of ongoing negotiations over a new school funding agreement. The Ministers may not finalise their negotiations at the meeting, but it is important that they agree to three basic principles as the foundation for the new agreements. They are:

• All public schools will be fully funded by 2028;
• The accounting tricks perpetrated in the current agreements that swindle public schools of billions in funding will be abandoned;
• The Commonwealth Government should increase its share of funding public schools.

These simple principles must be agreed on if ministers are serious about delivering a quality public education system for the future. Their adoption would secure the future of funding for public schools and give confidence to principals, teachers and parents for the future of public schools.

New figures reveal a scandalous squandering of $1.3-1.4 billion in Commonwealth Government over-funding private schools that enrol children of the richest families in Australia. The over-funding estimate is based on never before published data provided to Senate Estimates on the median income of families with children in private schools. This over-funding of the schools of the rich is in stark contrast to massive under-funding of public schools that serve the vast majority of disadvantaged students. The current school funding system heavily favours the already advantaged sectors of Australian society at the expense of the most disadvantaged. There is still no plan by governments to correct this grossly unfair system.

The new estimates show that just 105 private schools with a median family income of $209,000 or more a year will be over-funded by $692 million over the period 2022-2028 (see Table 1). These schools are over-funded relative to the amount they should receive as the Commonwealth funding share of their School Resourcing Standard (SRS).  There are 52 schools with a median family income of over $260,000 per year and they will be over-funded by $316.7 million. Twenty-one schools with family income between $234,000 and $260,000 will be over-funded by $163/8 million while 32 schools with a family income between $209,000 and $234,000 will be over-funded by $211.7 million. These 105 schools will receive $4.9 billion in Commonwealth funding during 2022-2028.

The new school funding agreement between the Albanese and Western Australian Governments is a significant step forward for the funding of public schools. It has several positives but the claim that WA public schools will be fully funded by 2026 is simply untrue. Public schools will under-funded by about $1.6 billion over the next five years.